Soul shards in cata

#0 - Jan. 29, 2010, 5 p.m.

will warlocks still be using drain soul as filler for affliction?

will drain soul ticks proc soul shards upon ticks and not kills as they do now?

are warlocks going to have an in combat way to replenish this resource?

will soul shards be something similar to runes as a resource budget that warlocks will have to juggle?

what im looking at here is say we use something called "soul burn" and it enhances our spell like say.. instant summon demon or instant soulfire. and its on a 30 second cd. after i have used all of my instant soulfires will i switch to drain soul to replenish and actually get shards back in combat? will doing this actually be worth the dps loss? (aside from affliction) or are they changing it to where we only get shards out of combat or upon kill? are we finally going to lose the soul bag?

i think ideally in a boss encounter i would like to use all of my shards for a dps cooldown, an exciting button to press during a bloodlust or an on use trinket that will make me pew pew extra hard. but not something i will have to min max with drain soul filler in say my destruction or demo rotation. personally id like to see the option.. if my pet dies over and over again and im out of shards a way to replenish would be needed. but i dont want to have to spam drain soul throughout a fight b/c soul shards are that essential to my dps

Ghostcrawler

#6 - Jan. 29, 2010, 6:05 p.m.

Ideally we design it so that you don't need a way to get them back in combat. We think that makes the shards feel more like cooldowns than something you do every time they are on cooldown. (Example: you generally save Heroism / Bloodlust for the best time to use it, not the first available time to use it.) It is definitely possible though that a lock could feel janked if they used their last shard just as a bunch of adds joined the fight or whatever. In that case we might have to add some kind of Evocation-like ability to get the shards back in emergencies.

In a very pure, possibly unrealistic sense, though we'd love to see 3 shards per fight with some kind of cooldown in between the use of each. I mean non-trivial fights here. Maybe you use 1 shard on raid trash and no shards while killing a mob for a quest while leveling.